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from my philosophy. So long as a thing is only probable our judgments must remain in suspense." The sentence is noteworthy as forming the starting-point of the argument of the Analogy. He stated further that mystery tends to vanish before the presence of growing knowledge; but in his application of this principle to concrete instances he broke down, and practically had no followers.

William Wollaston (1659-1724) received his education at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; he became a schoolmaster and took holy orders. He was enriched Wollaston. by the will of a wealthy cousin, retired from active work, and led the life of a recluse in Charterhouse Square, London, and there puzzled over problems he made no attempt to solve in practice. His system had the merit, or the demerit, of extreme simplicity. All sin he reduced to one form, that of lying. He also defended the doctrine of a future life with the argument drawn from the inequalities of this some place, he argued, is demanded "where the proper amends could be made." His reasoning throughout is independent of any authority or evidence derived from Revelation.

Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, was by far the most important of the Deist writers. His chief work, Christianity as Old as the Creation, Tindal. was never wholly completed, and only the First Part was published in 1730. The Second Part was destroyed in manuscript by Bishop Gibson, to whom it had been left. The thesis of the First Part is again very simple, and is based on the unchangeable character of God and of His laws. What He said, He said once and for ever. What, therefore, in Christianity was new was not true, and what was true was not new. Tindal added to this the unchangeable character of human nature, and there fell into error. Being independent of Revelation, he had not studied St. Paul as deeply as he had Moses, or the Apostle would have taught him in the argument in the Epistle to the Romans that Revelation is progressive, and adapted to the condition of those to whom it is given. But Tindal, quoting a phrase of Sherlock's, insisted that Christianity was not a new thing but a republication of the law of Nature, being in fact as old as the creation. The

III

CHUBB, MORGAN, AND COLLINS

37

student will again note the source of one of Butler's chief subjects in the Analogy. These were the chief writers. Others, though intellectually and morally very inferior to Toland, Wollaston, and Tindal, made much stir by their attacks. But after Tindal, Deism began to decline.

Chubb.

Thomas Chubb (1679-1747), for instance, was an uneducated man of the working class, and continually falls into serious blunders in his writings. His chief work, The True Gospel of Jesus Christ, published in 1738, contains, like the earlier work of Herbert, what he regarded as fundamental and universal in religion. He found only three truths. First, that conformity to the eternal rules which result from the natural and essential differences of things, and nothing else, makes men acceptable to God. Secondly, that repentance and a change of life, and those alone, will secure God's mercy. Thirdly, that God will ultimately judge the world, and give to every man according to his works. He denied the eternity of punishment, the literal inspiration of the Bible, and at least doubted the truth of the Resurrection.

d. 1743.

One only among these thinkers seems, as Sir Leslie Stephen points out, to have discerned the dawning of a truer and better method. Thomas Morgan, who in his youth Morgan, is said to have been a farmer's boy in Somerset, became a Presbyterian minister, and afterwards studied medicine, is best known as the author of Physico-Theology, published in 1721. He saw dimly that things require to be accounted for as well as affirmed or denied, and although his work had not any wide influence, yet he deserves to be remembered as one of the pioneers of modern historical science as applied to biblical criticism.

Two others should be mentioned as taking a different line, and attacking specific Christian positions rather than seeking for a foundation upon which to build the edifice of Natural Religion. The first is Anthony Collins (1676-1729). He had had a predecessor in the previous century in Charles Blount (1654-1693), whose Oracle of Reason (now an exceedingly rare book), written just before the suicide of the author, would be forgotten if it had not been rendered famous by Bishop Wilson, who made an extract from it in his

Blount.

Woolston.

commonplace book, now known as the Maxims of Piety and Christianity. Collins, in his Discourse on FreeCollins. thinking, first used for controversial purposes the nascent New Testament criticism of Drs. Mill and Bentley, who had stated that there were 30,000 various readings in the Greek Testament. Collins argued that a text thus shown to be utterly uncertain must require considerable knowledge to understand it, and that hence it was valueless to the ordinary reader. He is also important (along with Woolston) as giving to Butler one of the subjects of the specially evidential chapters which close the Analogy. Whiston had tried to vindicate the prophecies of the Old Testament by rejecting such of them as could not be made to square with the events they foretold. Collins accepted Whiston's process of elimination, but used it, in his Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, published in 1724, and later, in his Literal Scheme of Prophecy considered, to discredit prophecy altogether. The list closes with the sad name of Thomas Woolston (1669-1733), Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who published, 172729, his Six Discourses on the Miracles, striving to show that they had no historical basis, but that their value was wholly spiritual. He had published earlier some minor works based on the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture, a method he had acquired from his prolonged study of Origen. But it was in the Six Discourses that his main attack was made. It was a poor performance, full of grotesqueness and ribaldry, and more like the work of an insane man than of a serious thinker. He dedicated each discourse to a bishop. Gibson, Chandler, Smalbroke, Hare, Sherlock, Potter were singled out for this distinction. The sale of the numbers was very large, and they soon ran into a sixth edition, and called forth a series of angry and stern replies. Discussion was one thing, but Woolston's want of even ordinary courtesy and decency was another, and his book was resented more than any other of the Deistic writings. Whiston refused to support him any longer, while Gibson issued a pastoral letter and Smalbroke preached a sermon against him. Ultimately Woolston was prosecuted for blasphemy on March 4, 1729, before Lord Chief Justice Raymond. He tried to defend himself by pleading

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THOMAS WOOLSTON

39

that the phrase "hireling clergy" was where the shoe pinched his opponents, and his counsel urged that he had written as a sincere Christian; to which the Attorney-General retorted that if the author of a Treasury libel should write at the conclusion "God save the King," it would not excuse him. He was found guilty on four counts, and sentenced to a year's imprisonment and a fine of £100. The fine he was unable to pay, and he lingered in prison till his death in 1733. Dr. Clarke and Whiston tried to gain his release, but failed.

Deism was never organised into a system. It was hardly a school of thought, though a good deal of it was based upon the teaching and spirit of John Locke. The writings it produced are now mostly forgotten or known only by name, and their oblivion is deserved, for they do not repay study, save as marking a stage in the development of the theological life of the Church. They aroused thought and inquiry, and caused the men of that time to examine more closely than ever before the nature and foundations of belief in Christianity and in the Bible. To them we owe the permanent treasure of the writings of Bishop Butler and William Law. These live, while those that called them forth become buried more and more deeply in the dust-heaps of the past.

AUTHORITIES.-On the Trinitarian Controversy the works of Dr. Clarke and Waterland will be sufficient. Waterland has been admirably edited by one who was about his own intellectual equal, William van Mildert, who has contributed a most luminous and interesting review of his life and writings. The subject is well treated in Abbey and Overton's History of the Church of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i. Deism is dealt with at length in Sir Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. Lechler's Geschichte des Englischen Deismus, 2 vols., 1841, is indispensable. The writings of the Deists themselves are fairly accessible (with the exception of Charles Blount), but they hardly repay examination. Any one reading Tindal will have a sufficient knowledge of the main drift of the school at its best. Leland's View of the Deistical Writers, 2 vols., 1836, gives an accurate and useful summary of the chief books produced. Canon A. S. Farrar's Bampton Lectures, "A Critical History of Free Thought," 1862, are valuable, inter alia, for their vivid sketch of the rise and decline of English Deism. For the Arian Controversy see Curteis, Bampton Lectures for 1871; Charles Leslie's Theological Works; Whiston's Essays, 1713; and Memorials of William Whiston, by himself. Waterland's Works (especially vols. i., ii., and iii.) should also be consulted. John Hunt's History of Religious Thought in England, vol. iii., is valuable for reference to movements and persons throughout the whole century.

CHAPTER IV

THE ANSWER TO DEISM

THE barest sketch of all that was written against the Deists between 1714 and 1738 would fill a goodly sized volume, for all who had any pretensions to be called divines, and many who had not, thought it necessary to lift up their testimony in book, pamphlet, or sermon, and to print the same, against the fashionable heresy. All, therefore, that can be done here is to select from the multitude (itself a rather invidious task) a few of those which have a permanent value, and further to confine ourselves to those written by churchmen, while frankly and gratefully owning that the Protestant dissenters, notably Samuel Chandler and John Leland, made valuable contributions to the defence of our common Christianity. To avoid confusion, it should be noted that there were two AntiDeistic writers of the name of Chandler, the one Edward, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (afterwards of Durham), and the other Samuel Chandler, an eminent dissenter. Both wrote against Collins; the latter also against Morgan, and against the anonymous author of The Resurrection of Jesus considered. It may be well also to group the replies so far as possible according to the books against which they were written; although, since some of them the Analogy, for example are directed against more than one assailant, this will involve some cross-division. As Tindal was the most prominent of the Deists, the most important of the replies were directed against his book.

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The least known, but certainly not the least able, of the Anti-Deistic writings, was The Defence of Revealed Religion against the Exceptions of "Christianity as Old as the Creation,"

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